A Spiritual Lion Comes Again

An article written for an Auckland Indian community newspaper in 1989 prior to Sri Chinmoy's visit to New Zealand later that year.

Members of Auckland's Indian community will be delighted at the prospect of a visit to New Zealand this year by one of India's most remarkable spiritual Masters, Sri Chinmoy.

58-year-old Sri Chinmoy has been compared to Swami Vivekananda, who brought the message of India's spirituality to the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in the United States. Both were children of Bengal, both Kshatriyas, both spiritual warriors and both expatriates who embodied and spread India's priceless spiritual wisdom around the world.

If Swami Vivekananda planted the seed of India's spirituality in the West, then perhaps it can be said that Sri Chinmoy has tilled the soil and is nurturing the garden, spreading and teaching the same precepts as his peer and predecessor.

Sri Chinmoy first visited New Zealand in 1987, when he offered a Peace Concert of his own compositions to a capacity crowd at Auckland's Logan Campbell Centre. He also performed on the Auckland Town Hall pipe organ, and listeners were spellbound by his inspirational masterpieces which left a deep and meditative silence in the Town Hall before the standing ovation that followed. A creative genius whose 7000 compositions to date have all flowed from the silence of meditation, Sri Chinmoy offers his music as an experience of inner peace.

His works of art – entitled Jharna-Kala or 'fountain-art' – are also meditative in origin and of profuse variety and number, some 140,000 exhibits that again offer a glimpse into the higher, serene worlds of consciousness.

Sri Chinmoy's dedication to outer peace has resulted this year in a flood of tributes from the international community – an acknowledgement of 25 years of self-offering to humanity – and won him the title of the 20th Century’s First Global Man.

Plans for Sri Chinmoy's 1990 visit to Auckland and Wellington are well underway and members of New Zealand's Indian community will again have the opportunity to hear and see one of their country's most remarkable spiritual giants.

"Wherever there is aspiration," Sri Chinmoy has said "there I must go."

    – Jogyata.